Friday, February 9, 2018

The “FOCUS” of Digitization

Digitalization is the long journey with many bumps and curves on the way, to reach the next stage of business maturity and will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its digital ecosystem. Digital leaders need to define the vision, discover the blind spots, identify unknowns, bridge gaps, and ensure the organization will stay FOCUS on the journey of digitalization, to achieve high performance and maximize the full potential.

Flexibility: The goal of building a high-performance digital organization is about breaking down silos and being intentional about tuning organizational structures and developing processes that encourage collaboration and enforce flexibility. Flexibility is about willing to change or figuring out alternative ways to do things. A flexible organization is a complex and organic living system with such attributes as open communication, readiness, innovation, antifragile, accountability, synchronization, and partnership., etc. From a structure perspective, centralized, decentralized, and hybrid models can all work given the proper planning and management focus to keep them well-tuned for improving and being flexible. Breaking down silos and being intentional about developing processes that encourage collaboration and enforcing flexibility is crucial to think alternative solutions from the outside-in lens, build new things based on the business needs, and come up with optimal solutions to delight customers. Different organizations have different strengths, capacities, and capabilities, so they should take their unique path at their own pace for the digitalization. It is also crucial to building flexible processes focusing on outcomes without micromanagement and creates a sense of urgency as well.

Optimization: Digitalization is a continuous improvement journey. Optimization is not just about fixing things, but leveraging trade-off to improve business efficiency, flexibility, dexterity, and risk intelligence. However, in practice, too many requirements, too many conflicting priorities of organizations do not create an environment for clarity and optimization. Keeping focus is important for managing such a journey. Effective digital management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process. It is about adopting technologies to lower costs, optimize operations, and increase revenue. In reality, many organizations have little insight into their cost structures and have no idea where they are spending their money on and often assume it is mainly being spent on items which are actually much lower on the list. The goal of optimization is to eliminate unnecessary complication, but also encourage desired complexity such as design, or overall business capability management.

Collaboration: Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment. The most effective digital workplace is one where collaboration and sharing are the norms, try to digitally connect key resources and assets in the context of the idea reaching innovation hubs and clusters across the digital ecosystem. Silos cause slowness and small-thinking. Silo causes cross-functional communication and collaboration gaps. To break down silos, digital leaders have to not only provide clear process guidelines but also see that the teams are embracing cross-functional collaboration and taking people-centric effort. Imagine the true meaning when you say "Teamwork." Giving everyone a voice in how the organization and the people in it can prosper and thrive.

Unique Advantage: Organizations need to have two sets of competency, the necessary competency to run the business as normal and reap some quick wins; also they need to develop the unique competency to stand out and build the long-term business advantage. Either individually or collectively, being unique means to be genuine, be self-aware of your strength and weakness, and develop your own set of differentiated capability. The differentiation provided by unique capabilities usually is more long-lived. To build a creative working environment, it’s important to break down the status quo, encourage learning and curiosity, be open to new experience, be tolerant of ambiguity, be able to identify patterns and connect unusual dots. The leading organizations with unique competency have the better capacity to adapt, differentiate themselves from competitors, take risks to innovate in order to achieve their strategic goals effortlessly.


Scalability
: The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases.The digital ecosystem expands when the digital business territories blur and the business communities broaden their scope. To effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive and scalable. The highly scalable digital organization can expand and amplify its influence with the ability to co-create and amplify innovation in a digital ecosystem. Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or interrelational interactions amplifies the collective capability to achieve more values for the organization.

The very characteristics of digitalization are hyper-connectivity, hyper-complexity, and interdependence; with the exponential growth of information and fast-paced of changes. For many, the ecosystems have evolved without much attention or planning. But to manage a seamless digital journey with accelerate speed, it’s important to keep “FOCUS,” and master the art and science of digital management to reach the next level of business maturity.

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